November 24, 2012

by Walter Chaw The only kind of movie Robert Rodriguez should be making as well as the kind of movie The Expendables should have been, the knowing, balls-out Machete is unforgivable, reprehensible, sleazy, disgusting fun, and somehow not entirely stupid. It gives props to the eternally quickly-dead character actor Danny Trejo as the titular ex-Federale, a grab-bag of Mexican stereotypes who in the course of his bloody rampage (for justice, of course) uses a weed-whacker and a pick-axe, among other day-labourer tools. Meanwhile, when he's picked up as a patsy in a senator's ploy, he more fears that he's being tapped for a "septic job." It's unabashed in its politics, taking on the illegal immigration debate in the United States with a naïve brio and outrage. But it's all the more winning, I think, for its complete lack of embarrassment about itself. The thought even occurs that the reason it works is the exact reason a few of the better drive-in/grindhouse/exploitation films of the Seventies worked: Born of low pretensions, it frees itself to explore its outrage with a simple-mindedness that rings with the earnest "geez!" of a Kevin Costner joint.

by Bill Chambers A movie as ill-conceived as the original Bring It On (yeah, let's root for the privileged white chicks against the...all-black inner-city cheerleading squad?), Donald Petrie's Just My Luck fatally hitches its wagon to the miniscule charms of Lindsay Lohan. The migraine begins to form as soon as Lohan makes her grand entrance as PR chick Ashley Albright, striding out into the pouring rain without an umbrella knowing full well that the weather will clear up to accommodate her. (It does.) After scraping his jaw off the sidewalk, her Stepin Fetchit of a doorman hails a taxi, and while climbing into it Ashley notices a five-dollar bill stuck to the bottom of her boot. Does this cosmically-pampered princess tip the doorman with it? LOL! She's admiring the creases in Lincoln's beard as the cab peels away. Later, Ashley will receive two barely-provoked, if wholly deserved, punches in the face from a jailed black woman, while a Suge Knight-type record company overlord (Faizon Love) will declare: "I used to be [an idealist and a purist]...but then I decided to become filthy rich." I'm as surprised as you are that D.W. Griffith didn't write the treatment for this thing.

November 23, 2012

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, based on a children's book, The Iron Man, that British poet laureate (and Mr. Sylvia Plath) Ted Hughes wrote after his wife's suicide, is improbably transformed from the dark and Anglocentric source into a throughline pure and sweet to the rapturous Americana of Richard Donner's Superman. It captures an impossible period existing between the idealism of Rockwell and the lonely realist decompositions of Edward Hopper in a flurry of animated cels, telling the tale of a boy and his robot in the month or so when Sputnik was scaring the bejesus out of a suddenly-humbled, suddenly-Luddite United States. Accordingly, the Colour from Outer Space that was the monstrous bad guy in the book is transformed in the film into the paranoia of a country taught to fear an invisible (or barely visible) foe--marking The Iron Giant as something of a timeless picture particularly topical for a country embroiled in a war on foreign soil, a war with an invisible enemy, and the makings of a cold war with a country that has decided the only way to combat American aggression is with nuclear weapons. Tellingly, it's the appearance of nukes at the end of The Iron Giant that coaxes out the heart of the titular tin man--the last word that he has in the picture--"Superman"--whispered with something like awe that has never failed to bring a tear to my secretly-patriotic eye.

by Walter Chaw A man of many talents (a jag-off of all trades, let's say), the honourable Arnold A. Schwarzenegger made his directorial debut with the 1992 telefilm Christmas in Connecticut, a remake of a 1945 Barbara Stanwyck flick and the sort of unqualified failure that finds something like thirty dozen ways to redefine "fatuous." Dyan Cannon, she of the toothy, shark-like grin, stars as Elizabeth Blane, a popular cooking-show host without any actual cooking skills who's led around by her pert snoot by her queen of a producer, Alexander (Tony Curtis, playing Harvey Fierstein). When heroic Colorado park ranger Jefferson Jones (Kris Kristofferson, one definition of "fatuous" all by his own self) saves a kid from the wilderness, Alexander hatches the brilliant plan to capitalize on Grizzly Adams's national hero status by inviting him to a live broadcast of a fake dinner at a fake house in Connecticut populated by a family of terrible actors and an unspeakable mammy stereotype. It's hard to draw the line between fiction and reality sometimes, isn't it?

THE RETURN OF THE KING
**½/**** Image B- Sound C
screenplay by Romeo Muller,
based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin Jr.

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ways to tackle screen adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit. One is to do as Ralph Bakshi did with his 1978 animation The Lord of the Rings and present a sexualized and disturbing vision of Middle Earth; the other is to make a film for children that omits the more troubling elements of Tolkien (the racism, homoeroticism, religiosity), as with Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr.'s two feature-length television specials: The Hobbit (1978) and The Return of the King (1979).

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings**½/****DVD - Image C Sound C-BD - Image C+ Sound B- Extras C+screenplay by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, based on The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkiendirected by Ralph Bakshi

by Walter Chaw An adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Rings" books that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and ended when the money ran out in the middle of The Two Towers, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated feature The Lord of the Rings is unintentionally disturbing, occasionally brilliant, and fatally uneven. The film is faithful to the main movements of Tolkien's novels but told in the kind of narrative shorthand that favours truncation over summary. Its rotoscoping of actors combines uneasily with traditional modes of animation: they mix into an abstract soup of contradictory images that destroys our suspension of disbelief.

by Walter Chaw Jamie Lee Curtis is looking alarmingly like Kim Hunter from Planet of the Apes and Tim Allen remains the single most aggressive, unpleasant personality who's supposed to be sunny and hilarious in the medieval endurance ritual that is Christmas with the Kranks. An act of self-flagellation like wearing a hair shirt, say, or whipping oneself with a cat-o-nine tails whilst chanting the liturgy, the picture has all the Christmas cheer of a reindeer carcass and is the finest evocation of being in Hell since The Passion of the Christ. People voting for "moral values" this last election should take a good hard look at Christmas with the Kranks, which purports to champion all those old-fashioned, God-fearing, middle-American moral landmarks (family, community, Christmas) but ends up championing consumerism, venality, hedonism, vanity, and intolerance. So much intolerance, in fact, that it plays rather well as a horror movie. A character is asked if a family not celebrating Christmas is Jewish or Buddhist: "No, none of that," he says. It reminds a lot of that "Twilight Zone" episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," where a crisis shows suburban everymen to be monstrous, tribal, and dogmatic.

THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS****/****starring Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Denis Leary, Robin Tunneyscreenplay by Craig Lucas, based on the novella The Age of Grief by Jane Smileydirected by Alan Rudolph

by Walter Chaw The same between American Splendor and Ghost World is that both have middle-aged outcasts as protagonists who each collect old blues 78's, that both were adapted from comic books, and that there's a bus stop in Cleveland. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that with two solitary figures in search of completion, there is the possibility for recognition of sameness--but with two figures (underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis)) who have found in one another a sympathetic orbit, a partner in life and lo, with a child dropped willy-nilly into their midst to tie up loose ends, there is instead a sort of alien, island of lost toys exclusion that makes for a further alienation of the very alienated audience to which Pekar's comic so appealed and, eventually, took for granted and pandered. The difference between American Splendor and Ghost World is that one is in love with its contrivance and the other is in love with its melancholy.

by Walter Chaw Modest in its intentions and achievements, Peter Hedges's Pieces of April has an undercurrent of paternalistic racism that verges on the disturbing. April (Katie Holmes, great but wasted) and her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke) invite April's difficult family to Thanksgiving dinner. Because it's potentially, ominously, the "last" Thanksgiving, the estranged nuclear unit composed of mom Joy (Patricia Clarkson), dad Jim (Oliver Platt), grandma Dottie (professional grandma Alice Drummond), and their other two children Beth (Alison Pill) and Timmy (John Gallagher Jr.) pack themselves into the station wagon and head up the interstate. The picture cuts between April struggling to find someone in her tenement who'll lend her the use of an oven and the family doing their best to suffer the acerbic, often nasty Joy.

November 22, 2012

by Angelo Muredda Odd as it might seem for a 30-year-old director to get a retrospective, you can see the logic
behind TIFF Bell Lightbox's series on Nicolás Pereda, whose six features
demonstrate a remarkably consistent vision stemming from Pereda's interest in gently
setting an audience's narrative expectations on their side. Pereda, who's been
relatively unheralded in his adoptive home of Toronto (despite his sturdy
international reputation and his 2011 feting at New York's Anthology Film
Archives, to name just one laurel), brings the sophistication and focus of an
old hand to each of his formally rigorous but unassuming projects. Although
it's his most recent work, there's perhaps no better starting point for the
uninitiated than the aptly titled Greatest Hits, which sees Pereda
gathering his cast of players for a twist on the family reunion.

November 21, 2012

½*/****starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collettescreenplay by John J. McLaughlin, based on Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebellodirected by Sacha Gervasi

by Walter Chaw It's hard to know
where to even begin to pick apart Sacha Gervasi's dishonourable drag show Hitchcock,
a schlock domestic melodrama with Anthony Hopkins delivering a freak impersonation of Alfred Hitchcock from under a ton of prosthetics that make him look
not like Sir Alfred, but like Jim Sturgess as a heroic celestial from Cloud
Atlas. Start with the framing story, in which Wisconsin necrophiliac and
amateur taxidermist Ed Gein (Michael Wincott, one of the only inspired bits of casting in the entire benighted project) acts as Hitch's father confessor,
greatest confidant, and Freudian conduit to the darker recesses of the auteur's soul. He appears, see, the way Dustin Hoffman's imaginary monk
appeared to Milla Jovovich's Joan of Arc in Luc Besson's The Messenger:
In one scene, Hitch, on a couch, admits to Ed that he has unwholesome
thoughts about his leading ladies now and again. It's that obsession for the
"Hitchcock blonde" that leads to the discovery of a few sticky head
shots in Hitch's den, and for the everlasting resentment of mousy wife Alma
(not-mousy Helen Mirren), who decides to have her own fling with failed writer
Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston)--one of several credited writers on Hitchcock's Stage
Fright and Strangers on a Train, though Hitchcock doesn't mention
that. It doesn't mention much. I suspect that's because no one involved
knows anything, which is quite extraordinary when you consider that possibly no
other director in the history of Hollywood has had more written about him than Alfred Hitchcock.

****/**** Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, John Gavin, Vera Miles
screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on the book by Robert Bloch
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'd wager there aren't any films that have been more analyzed than Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the expanse of scholarship spent on it a curious echo of its own curious psychobabble anti-climax. Find studies of this film as the wellspring for everything from feminist film theory to measured leaps into psychoanalytic theory, from technical dissertations to Citizen Kane-style forays into authorship pitting the contributions of Hitch against those of graphic designer Saul Bass. I've read pieces on composer Bernard Herrmann's unparalleled work in the picture; on the artwork used in the Bates Motel; on the ways that Hitch's own queasy obsessions--themselves on the verge of explosion with his collaborations with poor Tippi Hedren--bled into the production. I've read about how the film was shot with Hitch's television crew on a minimal budget and about the controversy surrounding, of all things, the depiction of a toilet for the first time since the pre-Code silent era in the United States. I even recall writing something about how this film, along with the other miraculous releases of 1960 (Peeping Tom, Eyes Without a Face, Breathless, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Rocco and His Brothers, Shoot the Piano Player, The Stranglers of Bombay, and Nabuo Nakagawa's miraculous Jigoku), announced that cinema after this very particular point would never be the same. I've heard Janet Leigh's oft-repeated tale of how the flesh-coloured pasties on her breasts peeled away as they tried to get that shot of her hanging over the tub and how, damnit, she wasn't going to move even if it meant the crew in the rafters getting a good look at those world-class goodies. I know my favourite quote regarding the Sixties in film belongs to Ethan Mordden's indispensable Medium Cool, comparing the previous decade to the new day dawning like so: "Surrender to the Wild Ones yields a dissolution of society. Surrender to Mrs. Bates turns you psycho." I've heard the apocryphal tales, the legends; I've listened to Truffaut interview Hitch about the shoot. Hell, I've taught the picture a few times in my own limited way to classrooms still surprised to learn there are more things left to discover in Psycho.

by Jefferson Robbins I defy you to ingest the first minute of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (***½/****) and not yearn for the idealized childhood nobody ever had. It's not merely nostalgic, it's made of nostalgia. Traversing the quiet streets of your tiny snow-painted town, cracking the whip on a frozen pond, singing a Christmas carol that seems to have lived in your heart long before it was ever written--it's enough to turn a guy Republican. Then, the poison pill, in the very first line of dialogue: "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus."

November 19, 2012

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras Cstarring Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, The Great Gonzo, Michael Cainescreenplay by Jerry Juhl, based on the novel by Charles Dickensdirected by Brian Henson

by Bill Chambers It's all but inevitable that the Muppets would
take on Charles Dickens's venerable plug-and-play app A Christmas Carol at some point. More
surprisingly, Michael Caine had not only not played Ebenezer Scrooge prior to The
Muppet Christmas Carol (the role is like Hamlet for English actors who've
plateaued), he had never before shared a stage with the Muppets, either. This
despite his being, in the '70s and '80s, the exact calibre of star the Muppets pursued for cameos, and ubiquitous besides. He is, to
my taste, not a harsh-enough Scrooge--there's an irrepressible compassion there
when Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog) asks him for Christmas Day off. And The
Muppet Christmas Carol frankly surrenders too much of the spotlight to him: If this were my first Muppet movie, I'd feel especially double-crossed during
his song number with Meredith Braun, who is decidedly not made of felt. (Former
FFC contributor Ian Pugh tells me he "always, always, ALWAYS" used to
fast-forward this part as a kid.) It's almost cheating, to finally do
the Muppet version of this tale and put an interloper in the lead, when the
whole point of adapting it to a pre-existing framework is to match up the archetypes
and balance that against audience expectations. It is, effectively, like getting
to use characters as actors by casting them as different characters. This is
also why Bill Murray works so well in Scrooged, because Scrooge pings
off Murray's crabby, misanthropic '80s persona.